Scientists: Fracking study results obscured by politics

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Advocates on both sides of the debate on hydraulic fracturing are using the results of a recent study to back their political agendas.

However, the scientists behind the report say they're jumping to conclusions.

The study, led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, sought simply to measure how much methane leaks from natural gas production sites immediately following the process of hydraulic fracturing, a method of gas drilling that has rapidly expanded statewide.

But while oil and gas industry supporters have seized on the results to support their view that the technique is safe and has been overregulated, anti-fracking groups have dismissed the study as industry-funded.

“The focus of this work was to collect measurements,” said David Allen, a UT-Austin professor and lead author of the study. “Various stakeholders have emphasized some or all of these results.”

The Environmental Protection Agency and others had collected data on the amount of methane that leaks from natural gas production, but those numbers are outdated and have been questioned by both sides. Allen's team of scientists sought newer, more reliable data.

What they found, as Allen puts it, is relatively simple: “Some emissions were lower than previously estimated; some emissions were higher than previously estimated.”

That's a far cry from how the results were described by Americans for Tax Reform's Christopher Prandoni in an opinion piece for Forbes. He wrote that “average emissions were almost 50 times lower than EPA estimates” and then lambasted fracking regulations. But the figure he cited referred only to “well completions” — the procedure of cleaning a newly drilled and fracked gas well — not to fracking emissions overall.

In fact, the researchers found leaks from tanks and chemical injection pumps actually contributed far more emissions than the EPA had thought.

Dr. Ira Leifer, an atmospheric researcher who's measuring methane emissions across the U.S. for NASA and didn't participate in the UT study, said he knew the results would be misinterpreted because they “are irrelevant to the question people want answered.” Advocates wanted straightforward answers about whether fracking's disadvantages outweigh the benefits of natural gas.

The researchers' work was groundbreaking because they had direct access to natural gas well sites and could place emissions sensors as close to the source as possible — not because the results would make a sweeping statement on the merits of hydraulic fracturing.

“I cannot say whether fracking does or doesn't cause a significant increase of methane in the atmosphere based on the available data and the available studies,” Leifer said.

In other words: Experts say a lot more research needs to be done before anyone can definitively say whether hydraulic fracturing's environmental impacts negate the benefits of replacing dirty fuels such as coal with cleaner-burning natural gas.